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Tuesday, November 17, 2015

And So We Return and Begin Again. Kingdom Death Messenger of the First Story + settlement years 0-6

The Messenger of the First Story's reference to Ayla is pretty transparent, but a fun one. It also seemed appropriate for her to be the entry for the beginning of our play-through.

While I only started getting into RPGs during the next era (Playstation & N64) so don't have the nostalgia for Chrono Trigger that some have, I've been catching up on the a lot of the SNES games I was just a little too young for more recently.

I decided to go with a reference to the glowing pendant in Chrono Trigger, partially because the position of her lantern would actually make her face completely in shadow, and partially because I thought it'd be cool to play with two opposed light effects.

We've also been using her as our blue Savior, since currently our saviors are the most colorful of our Survivors.

Sessions

We also started our third settlement, and have certainly become more familiar with the game...

First off, we're taking most of the training wheels off. This time we're only playing with our very minor house rule that there's a space past Starvation on a hunt, and a monster can return from it (rather than immediately ending the hunt).

I'm pretty sure only one hunt type has this possible, and we just didn't like a 1/4+ chance to randomly lose before we had an opportunity to fight something on the large side. It's still possible to lose before the fight, but much more likely you'll just come into the fight in worse condition.

First Story
We returned to fighting a mini-Lion.

We pushed our luck a bit, but managed to beat it with no deaths and only one thrown Stone...

Year 1
...Which was good, since we only drew enough bone for a single weapon (an axe). We founded Home? and immediately innovated our Symposium, since we wanted to try something different (we'd started with Hovel last time).

We already started on some faithful AI manipulation with a Headband, and set out again.

The Lion was full of obnoxious moods this time, and we ended up with one survivor (The Clown) who'd broken both arms, and some disorders floating around, but no one dead.

Year 2
A big year back at camp.

We had our first kid, and had our two least offensively-capable survivors (being the most disposable) end up with evasion... which at first looked terrible, until we realized that it didn't matter much since they could be dedicated deck manipulators so weren't useless in a Showdown. This also put us at a large enough population to become a Society.

We stuck with being nice to our kids and being angry like monsters, since we thought they were both such better options than the alternative that it was unfortunately a non-choice (particularly in the case of Survival of the Fittest).

We also innovated Ammonia instead of Inner Lantern, again choosing based on the path we hadn't tried before.

We'd decided to rush Shields this time, and bypassing both antelope and lion armors for the heavier Leather set, at least initially. Since that was the case, we spent our white fur on a lion cloak instead of investing it towards a set, because that initial damage reduction is pretty nice as a pseudo-armor.

As another change, we went straight into Antelope hunting. Kaneda(!!), our first speaker hit hunt events which upped both his courage and understanding, hitting those respective thresholds really early, and making him a nice scout.

We ambushed the antelope, and generally gave it a bad time, though our one axe broke on its freaky teeth. We kept trying to get The Clown killed, being one of our terribly statted survivors (we sent him in since he had an evasion stat), but he just kept not dying.

Year 3
We figured out how houses worked. Also Avery, one of our first survivors, got a hankering for skulls.

We stuck with the plan and pushed locations, building both a Stone Circle and a Leather Worker, going in completely the opposite start from our last Settlement.

We then fought another antelope. The hunt was way less exciting this time, but the showdown was pretty fruitful. Our bone darts also broke on its creepy teeth, so by the end we had two harvesters and two fighters, and got a decent amount of resources off of it.

Year 4
We all got stuck in a scary mist that improbably made 3/4 our survivors draw the same disorder (from a thoroughly shuffled deck of 21).

Avery's aforementioned hankering had him eating The Clown's skull. We, being reasonable people, and not particularly liking The Clown, kept our distance while Avery hulked out as self-appointed team boss and got all sorts of crazy random abilities. When he was done, we also decided to eat what was left of The Clown. He was tasty.

We got some bandages, and a second axe since Avery wanted one and no one would stop him. We then realized something special: We had the makings of a katar set. So, again, as reasonable people, we made a pair of brass knuckles and covered in teeth, with which to bite our foes.

We were fighting a Butcher, after all, and as the saying goes, "Fight crazy with crazy."

(Last time we were at this point, we had a lot of defense and okay weapons. This time, we have two dedicated but not spectacular damage soaks and a whole ton of attack output. We also don't have any paint. Unfortunately, this meant that we couldn't do the complete freak-out high attack volume of adding in blood paint... which requires the concept of paint.)

We realized the folly of our build- high attack volume with a small hit deck is dangerous, even if you're strong.

...Also, we drew a trap 3 times in the top 2 cards in its hit deck, so it wouldn't have made much of a difference.
...And then the final card the Butcher had left made our heads into homing beacons for his angry.
...And we'd gotten greedy a couple times.

Any one thing not going wrong would have probably secured a win, with only 2 health left.

But that didn't happen, and we all died. First time we've had the Butcher wreck us.

Year 5
It was a sad day in Home?, because... umm... somewhere(?) there were nicknames being invented, but they certainly weren't for those dead guys, so nothing happened. Some new guy (Guy) invented fire and figured out a good way of fighting with it. We then made clothes out of our dead friends (who were conveniently just outside of town so we didn't need to look for 'em or nuthin').

And we went back to fighting antelopes.

Maybe we nicknamed their skin bits? Gross.

We had a pretty unlucky antelope fight. No one died, but there were such things as our single frail weapon to the single hit location draw that was dense, and one of our party never landed a hit.

Year 6
Then we were haunted and we needed to kill the babbling Survivor or not be able to do anything. Then the angry bad men came and decided we didn't need to know how to use ammonia any more and we had few enough guys that we weren't ready to stand up to them.

At least we were able to invent paint, though we really wanted to try to re-invent ammonia.

We then tried hunting lions, knowing that there was a 1/4 chance of one of our survivors (re)discovering ammonia from them. Which didn't happen.

And finally during our fight with said lion, it was my turn to control 2 survivors, and didn't hit once until we'd gamed the scenario to where we were pretty safe and my axe guy could get his proficiency up, but not before he first drew a trap (if we'd been playing straight, that would have marked 3 game's worth of survivors where I never landed a hit).